Category Archives: ideal

I am very pleased to announce my thingdom with a man I have loved for several years. Yes; Thingdom on Facebook. Where the entire romance with, well, Bob Holman began. Photo taken in Chicago, Illinois, our first weekend together.

In the photo, I am 60 and he is 66. I do not know who took it, an anonymous person happy to see ths elderly couple taking a walk in Chicago. We stopped and stood on ths bridge that connects us to every possibility of life.

Now we are a thing! –hallelujah!

a whole weekend of firsts! 23 October – 25 October every year!

For this anniversary a most special song, full of meaning for us, “No One” Alicia Keys:

Although it is much too premature to announce that my 14th book might become reality. a book about an exceptional man that I was lucky enough to call my father,

a former student now an editor, Jason Kirk told me how he liked the part he has read, and he was kind enough to make room for me today, a visit I surely needed in a time of enormous upheaval in my life. It was not my mother who understood me and tried to make sure that I existed in a world where any opportunity could be mine as long as it was in human possibility.

I will not say more as I would not like to spoil the book.

It was my father. 100% Daddy’s girl right here although I am 63 years old.

If there is any kind of justice in this world, then the book about my father will be book #14 for me. Unfortunately, my father died before the most important things happened, the birth of my own genetic son, the only person other than myself who has the gift of his DNA.

I wrote this book to show my father the greatest happinesses in my life, the highest highs, all of which he missed. I wanted my father, my son also, to know what it is like for me to really be in love. I wanted to introduce my father to the real man behind Thomas Robert Higginson, but I guess Thomas Robert is not ready for that level of TRUTH,, so instead I introduce him to a proxy Thomas Robert Higginson (proxy images above), but in my heart, and I hope that in Thomas Robert’s heart also, he is aware, and likes that it is him.

He was there when I was learning that theory myself. I will be learning it for the rest of my life. It is that important and transformative.

so far Jason likes the book! –and that means everything tonight. The book is a way that more people can get to know this man. And I wanted to introduce the persons most important to me to him. The gist of my ambition.

It is not as simple as you may perceived, because I really do love this man, whether or not it seems to make logical sense, even if you want to call me a fool, I still love him, and I do not love him today and stop loving him tomorrow. Maybe I will meet someone else, but until I do, this Hopeless Romantic really loves THAT MAN.

This love is deep and real, and he must decide what to do with it; I gave it to him, and all of it is his. If I am a fool, I am not the first. Maybe I will stop loving him, but it will have to its natural time; if he is indeed scum, then maybe I just happen to like scum. But he is better than scum. How do you know that he isn’t filled with regret?

How do I know that for sure either?

Maybe this makes me the most foolish woman in the world, but until I do not love him, I am not giving up on love.

Lord knows, I am not sure at all what this means. Nor am I asking you. Whether I am called “Dream Baby” or “Eucalyptus Octopus” or “Trauma to Quotidian” –all of these names came from Mr. Deightful’s poem to me, the poem I still believe is about me.

I like these names. I like that they came from poetry. I like when I started calling him my “Muse” and he corrected that to “Mr. Muse”

At first I was concerned that so much poetry in my new book, “Wannabe Hoochie Mama Gallery of Realities’ Red Dress Code” was either written about or with “Thomas Higginson”, but now I am at peace with that, because I still love the man, and as long as that is true, I’m not turning my back on loving him.

I am not sure how he feels about that but it ismy love to give him, and since I have given it, I am not taking it back.

Cover of “Wannabe Hoochie Mama Gallery Of Realities’ Red Dress Code

You were not with him; but I know a tender side of Mr. Delightful and maybe he did tell some lies. Maybe he did allow me to believe one thing when he had made other –temporary– (one can never be sure with him). I know what makes him delightful.

No; he is not perfect, but then again, neither am I.

A entire chapbook of poetry that Thylias Moss wrote with Thomas Higginson is available right now at Amazon as a book for Kindle, and you may also be able to get this chapbook as a softcover book (I will check again this week), but if you would like a collection of collaborations between Thomas Higginson and Myself, “Aneurysm of the Firmament” (spelled correctly in the chapbook, ad actually not on the table of contents in “Wannabe“), then please acquire this chapbook containing only poems of our collaboration which has been long lived.

You just do not throw such things away. I hope the chpbook lives on after I do.

I kissed Mr. Delightful, well, he kissed me first, and then I really kissed him as I have never kissed a man before. That kiss told me everything worth knowing, and the kiss was real, so until and unless I find someone else… He is not easily replaceable. He is not toothpaste or only the flavor of the day, but he is mighty tasty –you wll need to read the romance novel for more details of my inspiration.

You weren’t there. You do not know.

It is not as if one day I decided, “hm, I think that maybe I’ll fall in love with him” –happened naturally, and if I fall out of love with him, that will happen naturally too, and for the moment I haven’t.

Maybe this is a man I will always love. I’m not going into all the details now. And whether or not Mr. Delightful ever knows of this, I am stating for the record, that I simply have never lied to him, and I am not starting to lie right now. When I told Mr Delightful that I love him, that was /is the TRUTH, and I am also saying it now, because it is the truth, that I still love that man, and no advice can change my heart; if an when it changes, I will say so. I am not vindictive; I just love that man as I have never loved a man.

I gave my love t0 him, and it is up to him what to do with it. It is his. I do not withdraw it. That is how serious my heart is. It is his decision what to do with my love. If and when I stop loving him, I will tell him first. But it will not be today and not likely that it will be tomorrow; sorry if I disappoint any of you. Sorry if this only seems to prove that I am fool; I would rather be a fool for love than for anything else.

I have a precious connection with this man, and maybe there are not many women who would love him as completely as I do, just as he is, flawed and everything, but this one does.

I told him once that when he becomes 70, not that long, 2018, he may find a need to settle down his very active life, and guess who will be waiting for him? His “Dream Baby“, his “Eucalyptus Octopus” [which he corrected to “An” Eucalyptus Octopus” as written in the poem], his “Trauma to Quotidian” will be there as long as I still love him. Love is like that, and can be stable, and not trusting him does not mean that I don’t love him.

Among many things, no way that you can ever know all of them, he wrote this to me:

“It’s a gut kick to me and I know I hurt you which ricochets back and painful. I couldn’t take it further, Thylias. I am sorry that the realities of life —my family, my job, my grief — consume me in a way that broke the spine of dream. Were we younger, were I more open, if only I could have put my responsibilities aside and blahblahblah.

I’m a bad guy if you want that, Forker, but when I think about our damn dream time together, relive the drama interplay spontaneity of the performance we did, all we shared and held, for me—

It’s a friendship that I treasure deep. Always will.

I would ask you to consider this an offer to continue our friendship. To support each other in a new way.

In any case, know that I an here for you, always will be, in a way for us still to find.

Love, Mr. D

and he wrote this to me:

“Dear T,

What a moving and lovely letter, what a heart you got, a wondrous one, one that I got to know better, and better, and loved in the way we loved. A mind that evolved those feelings into literature, into a story for the ages.

And that art means so much to me —and this letter, just as much, meant just for me, explaining me back to me from you perspective, and through your lens. Our friendship has moved so many places the world cannot contain them all, and still goes on, growing every whichway.

So thank you infinitely for this gift of all possibility and the settling of the words’ world into a mutually respectful and fulfilling friendship. Of course that means ongoing, and how the works with collaborating, mutual performances, seeing each other etc etc —it’s all there, we just don’t know what yet, and that’s the beauty you have given us in this letter. The truth of it.

It means so much It means everything

D”

You are not aware at all (well, maybe you are also so lucky); but you are probably not aware at all of what it can mean to kiss this man, but one real kiss from him, not the sweet peck in the airport, but that extended foreplay kissing in the back seat of the taxi all the way from O’Hare to the hotel, completely erased 40 years of marriage, 44 years with my ex-spouse; it was as if no other man had ever kissed me –please try to understand the power and promise of that kiss.. and helped me understand desire and expression of love as I have never understood it before. Forever transformed me in the most “delightful” way.

That kiss will forever be fresh in my mind. I even have a bottle of his cologne that I spray n my sheets to get into a bed of him, recalling instantly what it’s like being in his arms. I play the music we exchanged with each other; you can’t hear it, but it’s playing right now in the background. I listen to a playlist of it when I, this woman with MS go walking my 5-8 miles, and also on the playlist, because I love the sound of his voice, is a recording of the support he sent me so that I could listen to it, as I was writing about the two of us –I would listen t ohs voice all day, inspiring me to produce my best writing, in my opinion, ever, and in response to some of that writing, also in the chapbook, by the way, but not in “Wannabe” from which the poem, “If You See Something, Say Something” by Thomas Higginson’ with my addition / extension was rejected for “Wannabe” but was a poem published by “The Fiddlehead of Canada,” by the way, but Mr. Delightful wrote this to me after I completed that poem, before the Fiddlehead publication:

“”Skippity,

Sitting by a calming fountain in Kiev, just after the bells of St Sofia rocked the plaza — real rocks of noise I can say a few things: how crazy are you? am I? we?

Pretty crazy, I’d say!

BUT certainly it is a continuously reviving poem A fantasy dream and reality scream You are a Go For It All woman finally free You constantly inspire, and I wish to too Standing off to the side and cheering you on Hey! Watch out for that banana!

The Mnemonic of Yr Palindrome

TMnOYP”

I can’t say what is going to happen. It is not my job to predict the future, just live it as long as I can, the best that I can and if I live it loving him, so be it.

I really do love THAT MAN. And this is a fact. Sorry if I disappoint you, but I am not disappointing myself. I really do lovehim, and it was not a choice. My heart did this. I do not involve myself with multiple men. Good for you if you are able to do that. I can’t and I don’t want to. I once told him that I would rather not have a man, if it can’t be him, as long as I love him, and since I do love him, I guess it’s many manless nights, a lot of tears, a lot of loneliness, but a lot of love for him to try to keep me warm in the coming winter, when I will be living somewhere else — he wrote ” Of course that means ongoing, and how the works with collaborating, mutual performances, seeing each other etc etc —it’s all there, we just don’t know what yet, and that’s the beauty you have given us in this letter. The truth of it.”

Mr. D, as delightful as he really can be, also wrote this to me, when I really needed it:

“Thylias, I feel from your letter that you need an immediate response to help ease you into that house, into yr mother’s dementia, into Mr Moss’s inflexibility.

Somehow it seems the fork of love will give you strength. That is strength I want you to have. Because this fork moves poetry and heaven and earth and hell and all history and muse push and language rush and Amstead and so so so much else, the All of It, I want to simplify my response to: I give you a life of strength and support in our friendship, and let you define the love for you.

My own personal life is not part of that equation. That is for me to live. This is a privacy issue and not important to that house you are going into. Please accept this as the eternal strength and support, or as long as you need or want it.

Godspeed. D”

(By the way, I need it forever I want it forever)

And after a discussion on, “letting me define the love for me”, Mr. D sent me this on 3 August 2016, not that long ago at all, :

““Thylias, It is Love & that is all, it is kin and Life itself. Sending you strength

D “

to which I replied:

“You know that I accept this. I like hearing that it is Love.

I’m just afraid that it might not be love tomorrow.

I love knowing that it is Love, I need that more than anything…

As long as it will continue to be Love, I am fine.

No one can say how long it will continue to be Love on this Wildest of Rides, but I am glad to take this ride with you.

Thylias”

(we even have a poem about this “Wild Ride” of ours,

and here is some of it, (should have been in the chapbook also, my mistake, well, for the next chapter f the next book, because there will be one, of that I’m sure; Love demands this, and even if for mow it seems that it is only me loving you, so be it… As long as I love you, it must be this way):

Higginson The Thrill Ride

Every emotion possible to feel, I have felt with you –highest highs of my life (also the lowest lows)

I once thought the Blue Streak at Cedar Point was a tremendous roller coaster, but you surpass that by far! –as “Higginson-Higgs-Mr. Muse-Mr. D” any of your personae— I have been everywhere with you yet nowhere

(and I wouldn’t trade this ride for anything).

You Are The Wild Ride

(Higginson)

Loving it

“Higginson The Thrill Ride”

Every emotion sighest mighty riotous highs belowest lows)

the Blue Streak at Cedar Point roller coaster blasts past my past into your past passed but you surpass t “HigginsonHiggsMrmuse-Mr.D” everywhere with you butt nowhere

(and I wouldn’t trade this wild ride for anything).

Remember when I wrote a poem, and you couldn’t respond w=exactly as you would have liked, you wrote this to me: “Thylias, wow, si o non

sionon

Great word

I am honored beyond beyond

But my plate is so big of full right now I can only make a new word and push on-words

Sionon it is on my part

You have my permission to use everything but I must beg your forgivenness in being unable to come out with the resounding affirmative the Soul cries for because I just do not have the time to do that. My film work, Ford Fdn work, poetry work, the Club, plain ol work, on and on —

I just want to ask for yr understanding on this.

OK, BFF?”

and this led to a poem in “Wannabe” “Sionon Epoch” also in the chapbook

The primary point Mr. D, always so damn delightful to me, is that my Soul still cries out for you, and I may be a fool, but I am your fool; it is entirely up to you what you do with your fool,

and for a time you were foolish with me,

and I just want to remind you, that very few men, maybe no other man, is or has been or will be loved the way that I love you, and though I will not use you name, you know who you are, just as in that recording of the poem you wrote for me, and I can prove it if necessary, after I rejected a poem you gave me when I found you reading it online and complained that it wasn’t written specifically for me, and then you wrote a poem that I knew was specifically for me, with the references to particle physics; you know me Mr D, better than anyone, and when I hear d you reading it you saud, “It;s for somebody who knows who she is” amd she dies, she is me, your “Dream Baby“, your “Eucalyptus Octopus“, your “Trauma to Quotidian” your Thylias, apparently always yours, for the long haul

me in the “Dream Baby” dress :

and speaking of long hauls, surely you remember when you said you would “drive an 18-wheeler full of condoms down my street”? –really might need that many for the next time I get to be alone with you.

It’s not just sex, but loving him, melting every time his breath was on any part of me, his hands, the weight of his palms, his exquisite tongue, his lips, sex became sublime.

I will see, won’t I? –he said it, he wrote it, and the “written word” is just as sacred to him as it is to me –no there’s no “ring” on it, but there is something that maybe even better, the rings of love around my Saturned heart.

I just don’t know what yet. But maybe something, and just as I am worth waiting for, with all this love I have for him, he is worth waiting for also. And so I do, committed to the love itself for as long as I feel it.

I am getting so much closer to what I really need, for a future as uncertain as futures must be if they are unwritten, and they are.

I do not live a pre-determined life; I know what I want, and I am determined to have it, whatever that means.

I am 62, no longer middle aged, and since it isn’t likely that I will live to be 124, it is necessary that I act on whatever I can, and living in my own place, on my social security, and yes, loving a man, taking a chance on what I feel, because what I feel is real,

and I know I might sound crazy, and I know you know, or think you know who I love, but my feelings are real, and I have already given them to him, so they are his, and he knows this, and what he decides to do with his gift is up to him.

I do not give something to him and then withdraw it. That is not who or what I am, a so-called or proverbial “indian-giver” (and me personally, as a member of this heritage, have not known such phony-givers, and knowing myself, I am not about to be one now).

This is my only life, and I want to live it truly and honestly. I am the one who must face myself in the mirror, and I want to like what I see. (I know you like what you see in those photos of me, Mr. D; you already told me that, many times). That’s all this is: my chance to live the life I need; the life I want, preferably with Mr. Delightful, and that “terrific life” he told me I would have, and not just because he told me; I will have it regardless, but so much better with him than without him, which is what he meant, as I interpreted it anyway.

“Terrific life” with or without him, but much better with him… He also said to me: “Relax. It takes time”

And that is exactly what I have for you: Time.

Just as you waited 25 years just to kiss me, I know that you also understand time, but, please, not another 25years. Neither you (aren’t you already 68?) nor I at 62 have another 25 years.

But I will keep waiting. And while I wait, I will work on rebuilding trust. I know you didn’t want to have to tell me what you told me, but even that did not destroy the love I feel for you. Dampened it, because you evidently could not wait for me as I waited for you, and still wait; Dampened, but did not, could not Destroy.

I can’t promise you that I will still be beautiful when I am 70 and you will be 76 (!)

–I can’t believe that I am saying and thinking such things about a man as old as that, but you yourself told me that love doesn’t care about age when you carried me on your back in downtown Chicago, and it was obvious to anyone who saw this woman in the short form-fitting skirt, even shorter for being elevated on your back, and where your hands were (under the skirt) as you carried me, and where my hands were on you and you know that the form is also real, and unaltered (like your banana, if I may say so:

“Hey! Watch out for that banana!”

The Mnemonic of Yr Palindrome

TMnOYP”)

–unaltered

like my love for you;

it was obvious what this aging couple had done, just as it was obvious to that taxi-driver seeing that aging couple making out in the back seat of his cab what we were going to do as soon as we were alone in that hotel he drove us to; everyone knew, what we had done and were going to do again and again…

The way the registration clerk chuckled. Such a terrific moment.

All of them. All of them Mr D.

I have to be willing to accept the bad moments with the good, –love demands this–true love does, that is, but when I list them, the good is ten times longer than the bad.

This “terrific” photo has its own life, as does this “terrific couple”

They have met in the center of the bridge… Desn’t matter how they got here, but here they are. And here they belong together. Everyine can see this, as you sad yourself: “That time was Delight” –you said that becase it was,it is.

The photo never dies, and nor does the love, Mr. D.

I love you, just as I loved you yesterday, just as Iwill love you tomorrow. Whenever you’re ready, you know where I am.

“Higginson”: The Thrill Ride”

(another poem for Mr Delightful [it should have been in the chapbook, and I will add it to the chapbook]. Hard to say who wrote which line; lines meant to be together just like Mr. Delightul and I.

On this historic night when a woman, the first woman, is the Democratic candidate for President of the United States of America, the OFFICIAL CANDIDATE FOR A MAJOR POLTICAL PARTY (next time, maybe a Native woman?); on this night, I am partcicularly glad to be a woman, and in this context, while I still await knowledge about the status of my romance novel, yes; that weighs heavily upon me, love requires this book, and I am in love with the character, maybe more than that…

Love is the way to do things; I still maintain that, and sometimes there seems to be some anarchy involved even with love that cure

Not in fifteen years had it happened, a short-lived (days) right-leg winter, an internal ice age situated in the bones. Alarming, yet exciting departure from the normal whose grip sometimes gets too tight and imposes an unfortunate choke hold on the extraordinary. A deep chill is also mercilessly clean; frigid winds sweep the southernmost continent pure. Polar ice caps like seals of approval. Some praise, then, for a little right-sided anarchy.

From toe to hip, sensation is gone and with it the awareness of half of my lap; a magazine resting on my right thigh hurts, an electrified Science News tries to shock the numbness out of misbehaving nerves, but the cold darts of current are excruciating in their intensity and fury. Only napped cloth like flannel or chamois, only fleece[1] is tolerable. My leg must be swaddled in it against the cutting cold of smooth percale sheets that unaffected parts of my body have not yet warmed; it must be a cushion between my skin and a piece of the thinnest onionskin paper that seems a slice of solid carbon dioxide so cold is its burn –I wince at the brutality of its weight as I persist in writing a love letter to my husband. Transfiguration is like this, sudden, without warning.

There’s a chance that, eventually, the conversion will be complete. By the inch, my skin (the body’s largest organ) will continue to lose sensory perception as I become outfitted in Antarctic finery, as I am primed for an absolute zero of being, becoming so cold that even in the temperate zone’s snowy winters, I melt like dry ice, from solid gas to vapor. Before it dissipated, the vapor from the dry ice melting a month ago in my sink (we’d brought back frozen novelties from five hundred miles away, Wesley so crazy about lemon premium ice cream) was white with ragged edges, scored patches of fog snatched from a more widespread cloudiness in an attempted liberation of sky’s preferred light and color. From my sink, stringy clouds rose, white rivers of spirochetes as I’d seen them move (making unheard pathological music) under microscopes in documentaries about Tuskegee, but these were benign and confined to the sky; these achieved atmospheric altitude. Bacterial and viral regiments invade silently, as if observing moments of silence to honor that which is under siege, to respect the victim (as the praying mantis seems a pious predator), to choose the host and not arbitrarily fall into an organic residence in which to proliferate quietly, reverently. It is strictly business when pathogens arrive. Suddenly, I have a cold.

The generations of virus (exceedingly more fertile than rabbits) neither celebrate victory nor accept defeat with noise as I sneeze (utilizing blaring defenses) and cough up phlegm green and yellow, for a few days, with infection. Sometimes there is also a dull aching in my ears, a pain both felt and heard; a gong distant and under water is what I hear while all through the course of the cold, the ear’s external appearance remains unchanged. In my eyes, some redness, also at the tip of my nose sore from blowing; an awful nasal trumpet when Wesley blows his nose to clear it of catarrh, in the process actually producing a note out of Gershwinian rhapsodies, but nevertheless, it is annoying, especially close to my ear that can’t choose not to hear it. Afterwards, Wesley usually leaves a tissue stuck in his nose and asks, “Do you love me?” Do I love him as a time like this, I think, hearing those thoughts loudly and clearly; do I love him when he’s behind a most inadequate veil and obviously feeling excessively comfortable around me­–and then I start hearing Chaka Khan’s record, I Feel For You, so that’s what I say, “Wesley, I feel for you”, as seductively as I can so he’ll hear only that (for I know how consuming seduction is, and how sensitive his ears are to both what tongues–make that only my tongue– say and what my tongue does) and not the layers, drowned out by seduction,[2] where I’m listening to myself plug into the blank all the words that can fit; I’m really singing. And I keep singing while preparing the evening meal, while blood drips from my not-infrequent kitchen ineptitude–no one likes to watch me handle a knife, cutting into my knuckles when I trim asparagus stalks, blood rising to the top of the superficial nick, rather like a Mercurochrome stain, then immediately thicker and forming a suitable Rorschach blot on the bandage; I once thought of making a poster (and science project) of used Band-Aid art, but was discouraged mostly for hygienic reasons; I’d taken the wrong side in the war to eradicate germs. There was other singeing as well, the vibrato sting of injury, a pulsating my ear disregarded, the waves of sting too shallow for what my ears could do: listen as Wesley told me he knew this would happen.

Moments and movements without sound dignify the ear just as forfeiture of sensation exalts the leg. Everything that vibrates yet is unheard is either infrasonic (below frequencies of sound waves in the audible range) [3] or ultrasonic (above frequencies in the audible range). When the audible range is bypassed, the ear does not have to discriminate; it does not have to declare as musically sweet, uniform vibrations that set in motion the fluid in the cochlea’s minute ocean where those tides are translated into impulses that are what the brain interprets; what the brain hears. Nor does the ear have to take displeasure (or delight) in more chaotic vibrations and their ruggedness, their dissonance that when allowed to intervene in melody lends the texture and complexity that improve musical compositions. The ear reprieved from making such judgments becomes a vessel strictly for maintaining balance. When its only function is balance, the ear is glorified; sound remains the result of vibration, but as if all of it is ultrasonic, all of it refined; as if only the ultrahighs survive sound’s elutriation–the spirit of music camping in a sanctuary of gently vibrating leaves or in the lethargic pirouette of the ceiling fan’s low-speed quiet. Such sound is not heard, but instead gives rise to awe.

The nerves of the lower half of my body after fifteen years have again (this time for a longer spell) gone insubordinate in disregarding the brain’s classification of sensation. The nerves want to establish their own canon of sensation although they are the brain’s own tendrils for the relay of impulses, root hairs from a rutabaga of a brain. Or perhaps more like a cranial Portuguese man-of-war armed with masses of tentacles, the ones that extend to my right leg, toxic. These nerves stop speaking to my brain, adolescent nerves rebelling and broadcasting what my brain dismisses as static, so extraordinary things happen: the open Jenn-Air oven door soothes, is icy when my right leg touches it, so cooling I don’t jump from its attained 450 degrees; instead my leg photographs a ripe and spectacular (so big and bright) berry. The rush of air is a blast of menthol and mint; I am ready to do an alpine skiing ad for York Peppermint Patties.

These nerves have become tired of pleasantness; a feather one of my sons has found will torment me when he places it on my leg, drags its frozen knife-tip across my skin, and in so doing, exposes my lies to him about the incipient majesty in anything without having to turn to sadistic or masochistic explanations. The world is song I’ve said to my sons; listen. The ears would flap and try to fly if song had not captivated them. Consider, dear ones, that deaf ears are so captivated, they freeze, and then there is just that greatness available as echoes in a spiral in a shell’s many inner chambers, a whispered “ah” that never ends.

In the morning, it turns out that a man has had his hand on my thigh all night, and I did not know of this simple contact that was trying to be more and would have been more with encouragement I would have given to such a lovely request, the tracing of small blossoms; that is to say: the transfer of his fingertip bouquet to my skin, an invisible tattoo. I wake to a stroking that coincides perfectly with light’s first and early stroking of the glass; the thin pale curtains are seductive in a way they won’t be later. The light heeding the raciness of the sheerness allows shadows of birds to dive into shadows of trees, fierce and eager lovers beyond caring about an audience. I wake to a stroking that exists only visually; if the motion makes sound, it is beyond my ears’ threshold of perception although it looks more intense, more vital than the whisper of his breathing that I do hear. For the first time, I resist pleasure, gratitude, tenderness, and everything that Wesley has loaded into his fingers. For the first time–although his fingers make wells in my skin, depressions around which ridges of skin rise somewhat like crowns. Ah, he still wants to make me royalty and I seem to reject it, the loss of feeling disguised as indifference. Years ago when we were falling in love, Wesley called me princess and my ears heard, because my brain sanctioned an elevation, the ultrasonic implications of his feelings that each day sought higher expression and made demands increasingly difficult for mere bodies to fulfill; the feelings were becoming so invested with fortitude and energy as to be able to exist without us. All unheard ultrasonic music is their song. The first time he called me princess, I wanted to fold the lobe of my ear up and the helix down so as to seal the actual sound inside my head, the cilia quivering always, mesmerized like the rest of me, a most rapturous form of tinnitus.[4] I imagined that if he places his ear against mine, he would hear the resonance of his calling me and from then on would call me honey cowry or concha or precious wentletrap.

During the past fifteen years, this body has served me so well, I do nothing but praise it and the beautiful conspiracy of its systems. Conspiracy because what occurs within me are secretive adventures: my digestion[5] and thinking are invisible, and exactly what my eyes and ears, tongue, skin and nose process is not necessarily disclosed; even my respiration is mostly concealed (especially under the sweaters and coats) except for the intimacy of breath I share with those invited to share theirs with me, a child falling asleep in my arms, warm puffs rewarding my skin with the most sanitary of kisses, or my husband’s whispering in the cinema or at dinner things for my ears only.[6] As for what is made visible when I breathe in cold circumstances, that is just residue made visible by warmed exhalation colliding with winter, just carbon dioxide waste, a fibrous or cotton-candy-looking skeleton of breath, My pulse is all mine.[7]

* * *

Thank you, body, for keeping the fifteen pounds[8] gained during my last pregnancy that was shared with a tumor trying to become as large as the baby, my baby’s mute, deaf, lifeless twin, fifteen marvelous pounds that have given me a voluptuous potential I’d never earned before,[9] being in the past so lean, my legs more like reeds, carrying me always close to shorelines where herons balanced on even less than I had. The birds took off as if flight were unremarkable, but the wingspan, the fully extended stole of feathers provided profound evidence of conceit and the arrogance I assumed was required to kiss off gravity in the first place. I like when birds operate in higher levels of sky, advanced sky that seems unlike the colorless portion I stand within, sucking it endlessly and mostly soundlessly.

The thinner the plant by the pond, bird-leg thin, the faster it seemed to respond to silent breezes, breezes silent to me, but producing sound at levels only visual to me or only felt against my skin (it is as if waves of sound attempt to enter the body everywhere, but succeed only with the ear) that horripilates if the air is moving beyond my threshold of perceiving sound is sufficiently chilled–horripilation is the eruption of goose bumps, an eruption that is like the score of crazy orchestration, minute brown whole notes wildly confiscating my arms. Was my first visit to Euclid Creek also my first time envying the grass that fluttered to air music I could not hear? Dandelion seeds would become caught in chords, holding those notes until a descending scale brought them to the ground where they germinated and prepared for another sprouting. As I ran, I too set the air moving according to my rhythms, and this the grass heard too, and this the dandelion seeds danced to also, a fully-seeded plant in each of my hands as I twirled, the seeds coming loose and riding in my small spirals–a carnival of imperceptible sounds; a disturbance of air that disturbed nothing else.

At some point, it may not be how things feel that has meaning. I will know a spoon is in my hand because I see it, because I hear it scrape the bottom of a bowl, stir iced tea, but without a confirmation of the logic of other senses, I won’t know whether or not a spoon has been picked up. Left will be only abstract feeling, extrasensory love, mental orgasm, more and more imagination. It is for love of a man that I hope the neurologists are able to help me feel again what my man wants me to feel every day when he kisses me, when he holds me, as he sets out to disprove the existence of inadequacy. I will still desire him; I just won’t know that I have been satisfied, but as I always have, I will enjoy his satisfaction. I have not wanted my satisfaction to be mine alone, but consistently I have wanted to give it to him, to make it large enough to encompass him, to transform a selfishness into a generosity.

At some point I may understand, better than I ever could have without this anarchy of body, that perception is a trick. Knowing the deception of sensation, I turn to eyes and ears, assuming that even if the whole body (including taste buds) loses the sense of touch, vision and hearing can continue and will do so more intensely. There is, however, the matter of my myopia, the distortion already present in how the world looks to me, blurry with my unaided eyes as if everything grows fur. There is a clean-edged perception from six inches in front of my face to a depth of relative infinity only through corrective lenses. My ears and their no-known deficit will have to compensate, It is amazing what the body can live without successfully: limbs, sanity, movement, sight, speech, breasts, genitalia, a kidney, voice box, lung or heart so long as there are artificial replacements. An external ear isn’t absolutely essential (to lose one wouldn’t necessarily impair hearing) except, really, for the cosmetic spectacle if such eccentricity of appearance bothered the earless one.

When I was about ten, I knew a girl, Judy, who had her ears pierced the day she turned thirteen. It was a home piercing; her aunt, another teenager, sterilized a needle in the gas stove’s flame and while the needle was still hot, poked it through Judy’s lobe that was already hurting from having ice cubes held against it t anesthetize it. Straws that had been singed at each end were inserted in the fresh hole to keep it open while the ear healed. She bathed her ears in isopropyl alcohol and witch hazel every morning and night, but for all that rigorous nursing, something went wrong. Knobs started growing from the back of her ear, a cluster of irregular lumps, excresences, keloids that made wearing earrings, those 24-karat gold studs she’d bought, impossible. I thought her ears would have to be amputated, but she still had them, the keloids too, two years later and the last time I saw her. Judy, although she sometimes talked to me, mostly hung out in the circle of older girls, some of whom wore earrings so humongous and heavy, they were weights that more appropriately should have been attached to wrists or ankles. These weights stretched the lobes and widened the pierced holes so tremendously, these girls could wear pierced earrings only on wires; there was nothing on which studs and earring backs could anchor. So Judy’s friends kept a couple of pencils or pens in these holes. Or they carried lipsticks in these holes, rolled-up dollars, and one of them, Shaynee, hid cigarettes inside the money roll. The Famous and Fabulous Lobe Girls of the Rose of Sharon Baptist Church Young Adult Choir.

I love the perfection of Wesley’s ears; it is perfection because of what has become a burnt standard, the darker rim, the top of the helix that flaming vegetable oil singed (on another night, early in our marriage, of my kitchen ineptitude) when he doused the pot with water, and only after scattering the flames (that then leaped to scorch the curtains also), thought to clamp the lid on the pot and throw it off the second-floor apartment’s back porch into a bank of snow. I run my fingers along this healed rim, delighting in its flame-caused fine scallops, fluted like a tiny pie, one downsized for a mouse. Our younger son’s ears were discolored from the moment of birth, all white except for the rim, the top of the helix where the ear was so dark, it seemed he had been born with scabs; the rest of his body was golden, a richly yellow tan. The white ears persisted for four months until there was a blessing of pigment–apparently drained from the scabs (they faded to tan) and redistributed.

Wesley has mild hearing deficit in his left ear; I have to get close, as I like to anyway, to speak to him on the left, where I usually am as we walk. It is mostly, however, his right ear that receives attention as my head rests through our nights on his right shoulder, as I ride as passenger in our truck. A decorative bass clef is on the side of his head. His own hyperbola–I am in love with Wesleyan geometry, the arrangement of his points, lines, and angles, and its effects upon space that I enter, that I bend and that bend bends me as I approach him, more supple than I am at any other time. He is a mathematical concoction, a figure of what exists theoretically in numbers; a prediction and explanation of what exists within things and makes them behave as they do, as opposed to a verifiable object. This is the calculus in which I would have excelled had I been allowed to study it when I was assigned elsewhere.

At times his ear seems a study of an embryo. In fact, acupuncture points on the ear correspond to an understanding of the ear as an embryo. Rudimentary ears form just a few days after conception, and the cochlea completes its development before birth.[10] Wesley’s ear is a map to all that he is. Its auditory canal all dark with a scant covering of cerumen (the wax that traps foreign bodies, such as insects and dust, and attempts to prevent their deeper penetration. His earwax is as moist and dark as molasses but doesn’t taste sweet, whereas mine is crumbly and barely amber) seems an ideal confessional. I love our time in bed, our voices low, so that our sons hear nothing but a soothing hum, my mouth near his ear because of how he holds me, my head an egg in his nest of shoulder, and I speak into that confessional, saying everything I need to say, everything he needs to hear, filling his head with resonance.

I have said to him that his ear is a partial flower, a single petal, part of an iris, dark, as dark as the wax his ear contains, because it is night and I can’t see color anymore. His ear is a night flower; it blooms only at night; it unfolds and releases a powerful fragrance that lures the nocturnal bugs, me among them, seeking that Aqua Velva bite and nectar.

There are night-blooming botanical rarities that many people have never seen, rarities for which it is worth losing sleep to hurry sundown and see the pale flowers open for the luna and white-lined sphinx moths, all of the moon flowers opening at once, the sounding of gauze trumpets, a unison oh so remarkable, unified to a ten-thousandth of a second. When they open, I open my body to Wesley, unified to that same ten-thousandth.[11]

Each day he comes home, from the office, to the only comfort that sustains him, to a castle of ruled by symbiosis. Now that numbness again is part of this royal treatment, that sweet man checks my bath, testing the water since today I perceive only coolness, relief, paradigms of beneficent expression–and nothing else in the world.

[1] The word fleece always comforts me with the thought of the generosity of lambs. I use this word just to evoke comfort when subconsciously I am tuned to needing comfort. I think much (both frequently and highly) of this generosity, this innocent dispensation that remains in force into a sheep’s maturity. An innocence retained. My ears as well are sensitive to the slightest emotional tilting out of balance, and also to the spatial location, so hearing the whisper of fleece inside my head restores; hearing the quiet of my thinking makes of my brain a chapel that dispenses equilibrium and renewal. As I clean my blinds by running a lamb’s wool duster back and forth over them, the wool’s lanolin holds the dust securely, dust composed of the music of existing, the ultimate disintegration of things into superb granular substance; to scatter dust is to release a slur of hemidemisemiquavers (sixty-fourth notes) into the air. With my wrist’s motion, I am making music; the duster is like a fluffy microphone although it is my perception and imagination that are amplified, not volume or my hearing. A conductor brandishing arms, hands, and baton makes a music separate from that of the orchestral instruments: a transcending, unheard, acoustically pure song exhausting the audible high pitches and still ascending, accessing summits where sound is divinity. Sometimes I watch videos of symphony orchestras with the sound muted so as to showcase only the comfort of this effect.

[2] Other than during such seduction, he is polyphonic, as human hearing is designed to be, able to hear as many sounds as are present simultaneously; pitch, location, distance, and intensity helping the brain distinguish each sound, the waves entering the ear at different angles, bouncing from one part of the auricle (external ear) to another before falling into the auditory canal.

[3] Some infrasonic vibrations can be felt, however, since they occur within a range in which some parts of the body resonate and make their own infrasonic hymns. Despite a human tendency toward intellectual chauvinism, our hearing is quite limited among animals (eyesight too, as we, unlike cats, for instance, lose color perception in the dark); dolphins, bats, and cats can hear well into what for humans is the ultrasonic range, and dogs can hear both higher and lower pitches than people can hear.

[4] Tinnitus otherwise can be maddening, I’ve heard, the hearing of nonexistent sound, perhaps a constant flute, a single measure of a musical piece repeated and repeated, each time further from perfection. Or a sound more harsh and equally unrelenting, wasp buzz or a wolf call at all hours, perpetual percussion: gong and cymbal, the sound of a migraine headache’s pulsation pushed limbically into audibility. Some researchers believe these sounds originate in the inner ear and are boosted by the brain’s limbic system which is responsible for emptions.

[5] Excluding belches and anal flatuses that I never laughed at even when I was not the source, for the sound that reached my ear was that of a tuba, especially the attempts of a boy (that I liked) to play one. He walked home from school trying to play it, letting the tuba do all the awkward talking, its voice deeper than his would be for years. As for the odor, it was powerful but faded quickly, so hardly powerful at all–a charming little paradox. There is also the audible borborybmus which is hunger pangs or a rumbling in the intestines such as what follows the ingestion of dairy products by the lactose-intolerant.

[6] “For my ears only” yet what he says is hardly original and probably not uttered for the first time; he has loved other women and told them things fir their ears only that delighted their ears probably no less (though I prefer to believe less) than my ears are delighted. It is fascinating that our secrets, our privacy, our so stunning intimacy is not unique–I cannot prove that what I hear is different form what other women have heard when he read to them the same passages of poem written by him (and mostly by others), but I would insist that loving him has caused a reshaping of the cochlea so that his voice is brighter than any other. So too has my skin been reconfigured, its nerves reprogrammed so that his breath and touch accomplish more (except where there is anarchy). My ears are combination locks, that is to say.

[7] And that s why it is appropriate that my primary are physician or the nurse-practitioner as if she make take it.

[8] That number again–repetitions always try to speak to me of a sacred potential, the repetition disproving accident. Symmetry is of course a form of repetition. And habits, say the habit of these footnotes, these branchings and digressions that seek to copy the anarchy of the way the arms and legs digress from the trunk, the ovaries from the uterus, the digits from the feet and hands, the ear and hair from the head.

[9] I can almost hear my hips that now are as round as bass clefs and their promise of rich sound.

[10] Here’s something else about the cochlea that I read somewhere, I think in Newsday: the cochleas of lesbians apparently become masculinized during gestation and are unlike the cochleas of heterosexual women; they are more like, the study found, the inner ears of men.

[11] I remember a girl I read about once–I think her name was Katie–who depended upon such night shows, who can never be a sun worshipper because ultraviolet radiation (the visible spectrum is not a problem–except that it is part of the electromagnetic range of sunlight) blisters and ulcerates her skin; light is fatal to her, so hers is the world of shadow, the quieter world when most things sleep, as if light also controls volume. Crickets seem more powerful at night, theirs voices more urgent. The sound of owls emerges, sound of wolves, sound of the settling of wood, sound of single drops of water, of my mother calling me home, as she used to (my bedtime), from many miles away; even the sound of caterpillars still polishing off in unison at dusk the needles of evergreen shrubs and the young May leaves become more pronounced. In the darkness is the enhanced demarcation of sound, is Katie’s concert. In the moonlight is Katie’s vacation, in the evening is her triumph over xeroderma pigmentosum (her extreme light sensitivity); in the evening is the rising of her award of the precious silver medal with it s any maria, all those splendid shelters from illumination, black heavens. She loves the ahs, depends on the hushes.

and the revised Thomas Higginson version, (since that is where my heart now is –always with this character, a prototype for the real man I so want in my life)

Not in fifteen years had it happened, a short-lived (days) right-leg winter, an internal ice age situated in the bones. Alarming, yet exciting departure from the normal whose grip sometimes gets too tight and imposes an unfortunate choke hold on the extraordinary. A deep chill is also mercilessly clean; frigid winds sweep the southernmost continent pure. Polar ice caps like seals of approval. Some praise, then, for a little right-sided anarchy.

From toe to hip, sensation is gone and with it the awareness of half of my lap; a magazine resting on my right thigh hurts, an electrified Science News tries to shock the numbness out of misbehaving nerves, but the cold darts of current are excruciating in their intensity and fury. Only napped cloth like flannel or chamois, only fleece[1] is tolerable. My leg must be swaddled in it against the cutting cold of smooth percale sheets that unaffected parts of my body have not yet warmed; it must be a cushion between my skin and a piece of the thinnest onionskin paper that seems a slice of solid carbon dioxide so cold is its burn –I wince at the brutality of its weight as I persist in writing a love letter to my husband. Transfiguration is like this, sudden, without warning.

There’s a chance that, eventually, the conversion will be complete. By the inch, my skin (the body’s largest organ) will continue to lose sensory perception as I become outfitted in Antarctic finery, as I am primed for an absolute zero of being, becoming so cold that even in the temperate zone’s snowy winters, I melt like dry ice, from solid gas to vapor. Before it dissipated, the vapor from the dry ice melting a month ago in my sink (we’d brought back frozen novelties from five hundred miles away, Wesley so crazy about lemon premium ice cream) was white with ragged edges, scored patches of fog snatched from a more widespread cloudiness in an attempted liberation of sky’s preferred light and color. From my sink, stringy clouds rose, white rivers of spirochetes as I’d seen them move (making unheard pathological music) under microscopes in documentaries about singinggee, but these were benign and confined to the sky; these achieved atmospheric altitude. Bacterial and viral regiments invade silently, as if observing moments of silence to honor that which is under siege, to respect the victim (as the praying mantis seems a pious predator), to choose the host and not arbitrarily fall into an organic residence in which to proliferate quietly, reverently. It is strictly business when pathogens arrive. Suddenly, I have a cold.

The generations of virus (exceedingly more fertile than rabbits) neither celebrate victory nor accept defeat with noise as I sneeze (utilizing blaring defenses) and cough up phlegm green and yellow, for a few days, with infection. Sometimes there is also a dull aching in my ears, a pain both felt and heard; a gong distant and under water is what I hear while all through the course of the cold, the ear’s external appearance remains unchanged. In my eyes, some redness, also at the tip of my nose sore from blowing; an awful nasal trumpet when Thomas blows his nose to clear it of catarrh, in the process actually producing a note out of Gershwinian rhapsodies, but nevertheless, it is annoying, especially close to my ear that can’t choose not to hear it. Afterwards, Thomas usually leaves a tissue stuck in his nose and asks, “Do you love me?” Do I love him as a time like this, I think, hearing those thoughts loudly and clearly; do I love him when he’s behind a most inadequate veil and obviously feeling excessively comfortable around me­–and then I start hearing Chaka Khan’s record, I Feel For You, so that’s what I say, “Thomas, I feel for you, as seductively as I can so he’ll hear only that (for I know how consuming seduction is, and how sensitive his ears are to both what tongues–make that only my tongue– say and what my tongue does) and not the layers, drowned out by seduction,[2] where I’m listening to myself plug into the blank all the words that can fit; I’m really singing. And I keep singing while preparing the evening meal, while blood drips from my not-infrequent kitchen ineptitude–no one likes to watch me handle a knife, cutting into my knuckles when I trim asparagus stalks, blood rising to the top of the superficial nick, rather like a Mercurochrome stain, then immediately thicker and forming a suitable Rorschach blot on the bandage; I once thought of making a poster (and science project) of used Band-Aid art, but was discouraged mostly for hygienic reasons; I’d taken the wrong side in the war to eradicate germs. There was other singeing as well, the vibrato sting of injury, a pulsating my ear disregarded, the waves of sting too shallow for what my ears could do: listen as Thomas told me he knew this would happen.

Moments and movements without sound dignify the ear just as forfeiture of sensation exalts the leg. Everything that vibrates yet is unheard is either infrasonic (below frequencies of sound waves in the audible range)[3] or ultrasonic (above frequencies in the audible range). When the audible range is bypassed, the ear does not have to discriminate; it does not have to declare as musically sweet, uniform vibrations that set in motion the fluid in the cochlea’s minute ocean where those tides are translated into impulses that are what the brain interprets; what the brain hears. Nor does the ear have to take displeasure (or delight) in more chaotic vibrations and their ruggedness, their dissonance that when allowed to intervene in melody lends the texture and complexity that improve musical compositions. The ear reprieved from making such judgments becomes a vessel strictly for maintaining balance. When its only function is balance, the ear is glorified; sound remains the result of vibration, but as if all of it is ultrasonic, all of it refined; as if only the ultrahighs survive sound’s elutriation–the spirit of music camping in a sanctuary of gently vibrating leaves or in the lethargic pirouette of the ceiling fan’s low-speed quiet. Such sound is not heard, but instead gives rise to awe.

The nerves of the lower half of my body after fifteen years have again (this time for a longer spell) gone insubordinate in disregarding the brain’s classification of sensation. The nerves want to establish their own canon of sensation although they are the brain’s own tendrils for the relay of impulses, root hairs from a rutabaga of a brain. Or perhaps more like a cranial Portuguese man-of-war armed with masses of tentacles, the ones that extend to my right leg, toxic. These nerves stop speaking to my brain, adolescent nerves rebelling and broadcasting what my brain dismisses as static, so extraordinary things happen: the open Jenn-Air oven door soothes, is icy when my right leg touches it, so cooling I don’t jump from its attained 450 degrees; instead my leg photographs a ripe and spectacular (so big and bright) berry. The rush of air is a blast of menthol and mint; I am ready to do an alpine skiing ad for York Peppermint Patties.

These nerves have become tired of pleasantness; a feather one of my sons has found will torment me when he places it on my leg, drags its frozen knife-tip across my skin, and in so doing, exposes my lies to him about the incipient majesty in anything without having to turn to sadistic or masochistic explanations. The world is song I’ve said to my sons; listen. The ears would flap and try to fly if song had not captivated them. Consider, dear ones, that deaf ears are so captivated, they freeze, and then there is just that greatness available as echoes in a spiral in a shell’s many inner chambers, a whispered “ah” that never ends.

In the morning, it turns out that a man has had his hand on my thigh all night, and I did not know of this simple contact that was trying to be more and would have been more with encouragement I would have given to such a lovely request, the tracing of small blossoms; that is to say: the transfer of his fingertip bouquet to my skin, an invisible tattoo. I wake to a stroking that coincides perfectly with light’s first and early stroking of the glass; the thin pale curtains are seductive in a way they won’t be later. The light heeding the raciness of the sheerness allows shadows of birds to dive into shadows of trees, fierce and eager lovers beyond caring about an audience. I wake to a stroking that exists only visually; if the motion makes sound, it is beyond my ears’ threshold of perception although it looks more intense, more vital than the whisper of his breathing that I do hear. For the first time, I resist pleasure, gratitude, tenderness, and everything that Thomas has loaded into his fingers. For the first time–although his fingers make wells in my skin, depressions around which ridges of skin rise somewhat like crowns. Ah, he still wants to make me royalty and I seem to reject it, the loss of feeling disguised as indifference. Years ago when we were falling in love, Thomas called me princess and my ears heard, because my brain sanctioned an elevation, the ultrasonic implications of his feelings that each day sought higher expression and made demands increasingly difficult for mere bodies to fulfill; the feelings were becoming so invested with fortitude and energy as to be able to exist without us. All unheard ultrasonic music is their song. The first time he called me princess, I wanted to fold the lobe of my ear up and the helix down so as to seal the actual sound inside my head, the cilia quivering always, mesmerized like the rest of me, a most rapturous form of tinnitus.[4] I imagined that if he places his ear against mine, he would hear the resonance of his calling me and from then on would call me honey cowry or concha or precious wentletrap.

During the past fifteen years, this body has served me so well, I do nothing but praise it and the beautiful conspiracy of its systems. Conspiracy because what occurs within me are secretive adventures: my digestion[5] and thinking are invisible, and exactly what my eyes and ears, tongue, skin and nose process is not necessarily disclosed; even my respiration is mostly concealed (especially under the sweaters and coats) except for the intimacy of breath I share with those invited to share theirs with me, a child falling asleep in my arms, warm puffs rewarding my skin with the most sanitary of kisses, or my husbands whispering in the cinema or at dinner things for my ears only.[6] As for what is made visible when I breathe in cold circumstances, that is just residue made visible by warmed exhalation colliding with winter, just carbon dioxide waste, a fibrous or cotton-candy-looking skeleton of breath, My pulse is all mine.[7]

* * *

Thank you, body, for keeping the fifteen pounds[8] gained during my last pregnancy that was shared with a tumor trying to become as large as the baby, my baby’s mute, deaf, lifeless twin, fifteen marvelous pounds that have given me a voluptuous potential I’d never earned before,[9] being in the past so lean, my legs more like reeds, carrying me always close to shorelines where herons balanced on even less than I had. The birds took off as if flight were unremarkable, but the wingspan, the fully extended stole of feathers provided profound evidence of conceit and the arrogance I assumed was required to kiss off gravity in the first place. I like when birds operate in higher levels of sky, advanced sky that seems unlike the colorless portion I stand within, sucking it endlessly and mostly soundlessly.

The thinner the plant by the pond, bird-leg thin, the faster it seemed to respond to silent breezes, breezes silent to me, but producing sound at levels only visual to me or only felt against my skin (it is as if waves of sound attempt to enter the body everywhere, but succeed only with the ear) that horripilates if the air is moving beyond my threshold of perceiving sound is sufficiently chilled– is the eruption of goose bumps, an eruption that is like the score of crazy orchestration, minute brown whole notes wildly confiscating my arms. Was my first visit to Euclid Creek also my first time envying the grass that fluttered to air music I could not hear? Dandelion seeds would become caught in chords, holding those notes until a descending scale brought them to the ground where they germinated and prepared for another sprouting. As I ran, I too set the air moving according to my rhythms, and this the grass heard too, and this the dandelion seeds danced to also, a fully-seeded plant in each of my hands as I twirled, the seeds coming loose and riding in my small spirals–a carnival of imperceptible sounds; a disturbance of air that disturbed nothing else.

At some point, it may not be how things feel that has meaning. I will know a spoon is in my hand because I see it, because I hear it scrape the bottom of a bowl, stir iced tea, but without a confirmation of the logic of other senses, I won’t know whether or not a spoon has been picked up. Left will be only abstract feeling, extrasensory love, mental orgasm, more and more imagination. It is for love of a man that I hope the neurologists are able to help me feel again what my man wants me to feel every day when he kisses me, when he holds me, as he sets out to disprove the existence of inadequacy. I will still desire him; I just won’t know that I have been satisfied, but as I always have, I will enjoy his satisfaction. I have not wanted my satisfaction to be mine alone, but consistently I have wanted to give it to him, to make it large enough to encompass him, to transform a selfishness into a generosity.

At some point I may understand, better than I ever could have without this anarchy of body, that perception is a trick. Knowing the deception of sensation, I turn to eyes and ears, assuming that even if the whole body (including taste buds) loses the sense of touch, vision and hearing can continue and will do so more intensely. There is, however, the matter of my myopia, the distortion already present in how the world looks to me, blurry with my unaided eyes as if everything grows fur. There is a clean-edged perception from six inches in front of my face to a depth of relative infinity only through corrective lenses. My ears and their no-known deficit will have to compensate, It is amazing what the body can live without successfully: limbs, sanity, movement, sight, speech, breasts, genitalia, a kidney, voice box, lung or heart so long as there are artificial replacements. An external ear isn’t absolutely essential (to lose one wouldn’t necessarily impair hearing) except, really, for the cosmetic spectacle if such eccentricity of appearance bothered the earless one.

When I was about ten, I knew a girl, Judy, who had her ears pierced the day she turned thirteen. It was a home piercing; her aunt, another teenager, sterilized a needle in the gas stove’s flame and while the needle was still hot, poked it through Judy’s lobe that was already hurting from having ice cubes held against it t anesthetize it. Straws that had been singed at each end were inserted in the fresh hole to keep it open while the ear healed. She bathed her ears in isopropyl alcohol and witch hazel every morning and night, but for all that rigorous nursing, something went wrong. Knobs started growing from the back of her ear, a cluster of irregular lumps, excresences, keloids that made wearing earrings, those 24-karat gold studs she’d bought, impossible. I thought her ears would have to be amputated, but she still had them, the keloids too, two years later and the last time I saw her. Judy, although she sometimes talked to me, mostly hung out in the circle of older girls, some of whom wore earrings so humongous and heavy, they were weights that more appropriately should have been attached to wrists or ankles. These weights stretched the lobes and widened the pierced holes so tremendously, these girls could wear pierced earrings only on wires; there was nothing on which studs and earring backs could anchor. So Judy’s friends kept a couple of pencils or pens in these holes. Or they carried lipsticks in these holes, rolled-up dollars, and one of them, Shaynee, hid cigarettes inside the money roll. The Famous and Fabulous Lobe Girls of the Rose of Sharon Baptist Church Young Adult Choir.

I love the perfection of Thomas’s ears; it is perfection because of what has become a burnt standard, the darker rim, the top of the helix that flaming vegetable oil singed (on another night, early in our marriage, of my kitchen ineptitude) when he doused the pot with water, and only after scattering the flames (that then leaped to scorch the curtains also), thought to clamp the lid on the pot and throw it off the second-floor apartment’s back porch into a bank of snow. I run my fingers along this healed rim, delighting in its flame-caused fine scallops, fluted like a tiny pie, one downsized for a mouse. Our younger son’s ears were discolored from the moment of birth, all white except for the rim, the top of the helix where the ear was so dark, it seemed he had been born with scabs; the rest of his body was golden, a richly yellow tan. The white ears persisted for four months until there was a blessing of pigment–apparently drained from the scabs (they faded to tan) and redistributed.

Thomas has mild hearing deficit in his left ear; I have to get close, as I like to anyway, to speak to him on the left, where I usually am as we walk. It is mostly, however, his right ear that receives attention as my head rests through our nights on his right shoulder, as I ride as passenger in our truck. A decorative bass clef is on the side of his head. His own hyperbola–I am in love with Thomasan geometry, the arrangement of his points, lines, and angles, and its effects upon space that I enter, that I bend and that bends me as I approach him, more supple than I am at any other time. He is a mathematical concoction, a figure of what exists theoretically in numbers; a prediction and explanation of what exists within things and makes them behave as they do, as opposed to a verifiable object. This is the calculus in which I would have excelled had I been allowed to study it when I was assigned elsewhere.

At times his ear seems a study of an embryo. In fact, acupuncture points on the ear correspond to an understanding of the ear as an embryo. Rudimentary ears form just a few days after conception, and the cochlea completes its development before birth.[10] Thomas’s ear is a map to all that he is. Its auditory canal all dark with a scant covering of cerumen (the wax that traps foreign bodies, such as insects and dust, and attempts to prevent their deeper penetration. His earwax is as moist and dark as molasses but doesn’t taste sweet, whereas mine is crumbly and barely amber) seems an ideal confessional. I love our time in bed, our voices low, so that our sons hear nothing but a soothing hum, my mouth near his ear because of how he holds me, my head an egg in his nest of shoulder, and I speak into that confessional, saying everything I need to say, everything he needs to hear, filling his head with resonance.

I have said to him that his ear is a partial flower, a single petal, part of an iris, dark, as dark as the wax his ear contains, because it is night and I can’t see color anymore. His ear is a night flower; it blooms only at night; it unfolds and releases a powerful fragrance that lures the nocturnal bugs, me among them, seeking that Dakar bite and nectar.

There are night-blooming botanical rarities that many people have never seen, rarities for which it is worth losing sleep to hurry sundown and see the pale flowers open for the luna and white-lined sphinx moths, all of the moon flowers opening at once, the sounding of gauze trumpets, a unison oh so remarkable, unified to a ten-thousandth of a second. When they open, I open my body to Thomas, unified to that same ten-thousandth.[11]

Each day he comes home, from the office, to the only comfort that sustains him, to a castle of ruled by symbiosis. Now that numbness again is part of this royal treatment, that sweet man checks my bath, testing the water since today I perceive only coolness, relief, paradigms of beneficent expression–and nothing else in the world.

[1] The word fleece always comforts me with the thought of the generosity of lambs. I use this word just to evoke comfort when subconsciously I am tuned to needing comfort. I think much (both frequently and highly) of this generosity, this innocent dispensation that remains in force into a sheep’s maturity. An innocence retained. My ears as well are sensitive to the slightest emotional tilting out of balance, and also to the spatial location, so hearing the whisper of fleece inside my head restores; hearing the quiet of my thinking makes of my brain a chapel that dispenses equilibrium and renewal. As I clean my blinds by running a lamb’s wool duster back and forth over them, the wool’s lanolin holds the dust securely, dust composed of the music of existing, the ultimate disintegration of things into superb granular substance; to scatter dust is to release a slur of hemidemisemiquavers (sixty-fourth notes) into the air. With my wrist’s motion, I am making music; the duster is like a fluffy microphone although it is my perception and imagination that are amplified, not volume or my hearing. A conductor brandishing arms, hands, and baton makes a music separate from that of the orchestral instruments: a transcending, unheard, acoustically pure song exhausting the audible high pitches and still ascending, accessing summits where sound is divinity. Sometimes I watch videos of symphony orchestras with the sound muted so as to showcase only the comfort of this effect.

[2] Other than during such seduction, he is polyphonic, as human hearing is designed to be, able to hear as many sounds as are present simultaneously; pitch, location, distance, and intensity helping the brain distinguish each sound, the waves entering the ear at different angles, bouncing from one part of the auricle (external ear) to another before falling into the auditory canal.

[3] Some infrasonic vibrations can be felt, however, since they occur within a range in which some parts of the body resonate and make their own infrasonic hymns. Despite a human tendency toward intellectual chauvinism, our hearing is quite limited among animals (eyesight too, as we, unlike cats, for instance, lose color perception in the dark); dolphins, bats, and cats can hear well into what for humans is the ultrasonic range, and dogs can hear both higher and lower pitches than people can hear.

[4] Tinnitus otherwise can be maddening, I’ve heard, the hearing of nonexistent sound, perhaps a constant flute, a single measure of a musical piece repeated and repeated, each time further from perfection. Or a sound more harsh and equally unrelenting, wasp buzz or a wolf call at all hours, perpetual percussion: gong and cymbal, the sound of a migraine headache’s pulsation pushed limbically into audibility. Some researchers believe these sounds originate in the inner ear and are boosted by the brain’s limbic system which is responsible for emptions.

[5] Excluding belches and anal flatuses that I never laughed at even when I was not the source, for the sound that reached my ear was that f a tuba, especially the attempts of a boy (that I liked) to play one. He walked home from school trying to play it, letting the tuba do all the awkward talking, its voice deeper than his would be for years. As for the odor, it was powerful but faded quickly, so hardly powerful at all–a charming little paradox. There is also the audible borborybmus which is hunger pangs or a rumbling in the intestines such as what follows the ingestion of dairy products by the lactose-intolerant.

[6] “For my ears only” yet what he says is hardly original and probably not uttered for the first time; he has loved other women and told them things fir their ears only that delighted their ears probably no less (though I prefer to believe less) than my ears are delighted. It is fascinating that our secrets, our privacy, our so stunning intimacy is not unique–I cannot prove that what I hear is different from what other women have heard when he read to them the same passages of poem written by him (and mostly by others), but I would insist that loving him has caused a reshaping of the cochlea so that his voice is brighter than any other. So too has my skin been reconfigured, its nerves reprogrammed so that his breath and touch accomplish more (except where there is anarchy). My ears are combination locks, that is to say.

[7] And that’s why it is appropriate that my primary are physician or the nurse-practitioner as if she make take it.

[8] That number again–repetitions always try to speak to me of a sacred potential, the repetition disproving accident. Symmetry is of course a form of repetition. And habits, say the habit of these footnotes, these branchings and digressions that seek to copy the anarchy of the way the arms and legs digress from the trunk, the ovaries from the uterus, the digits from the feet and hands, the ear and hair from the head.

[9] I can almost hear my hips that now are as round as bass clefs and their promise of rich sound.

[10] Here’s something else about the cochlea that I read somewhere, I think in Newsday: the cochleas of lesbians apparently become masculinized during gestation and are unlike the cochleas of heterosexual women; they are more like, the study found, the inner ears of men.

[11] I remember a girl I read about once–I think her name was Katie–who depended upon such night shows, who can never be a sun worshipper because ultraviolet radiation (the visible spectrum is not a problem–except that it is part of the electromagnetic range of sunlight) blisters and ulcerates her skin; light is fatal to her, so hers is the world of shadow, the quieter world when most things sleep, as if light also controls volume. Crickets seem more powerful at night, theirs voices more urgent. The sound of owls emerges, sound of wolves, sound of the settling of wood, sound of single drops of water, of my mother calling me home, as she used to (my bedtime), from many miles away; even the sound of still polishing off in unison at dusk the needles of evergreen shrubs and the young May leaves become more pronounced. In the darkness is the enhanced demarcation of sound, is Katie’s concert. In the moonlight is Katie’s vacation, in the evening is her triumph over xeroderma pigmentosum (her extreme light sensitivity); in the evening is the rising of her award of the precious silver medal with it s any maria, all those splendid shelters from illumination, black heavens. She loves the ahs, depends on the hushes.

On this summer afternoon, I still wait to hear about the status of my romance novel. Yes I guess I am impatient, still working on selling my house, and having the terrific life that a very good friend of mine, a Mystery Man (with whom I am in love –ouch) told me I am going to have.

Whatever this post is, it is also a post to a Mystery Man

It is also a post to you, whoever you are; I will never tell.

I have no idea where I am going to live. Just that I will be moving –and I am looking forward to beginning this new life, with or without you, but preferably with you. Definitely my preference, but I can’t say that it will ever be yours. Wish I could say that. Because I love you.

Because I want you to love me too. I even told you that I know I am your “Side Chick” (at best –and I’m okay with that? What is wrong with me? –willing to be the side chick just so I can have you? Why don’t I want more for myself? –yeah; I already know you are the best possible lover, and I probably should not have told you that, but I did because it’s true, and I realize that I am too public for you, Mystery Man, but I don’t want the light of what I feel hidden under a bushel. I light it just for you, light of my world. Do not let the fire that warms you go out, already dimmed a bit by time itself, but I am making up for that. I am blowing on the flame; my hot breath is working that fire, fanning those embers, restoring the hot potential, living up to my blazing name…

I also said some other things that the pressure of all this forced me into saying, trying to get my house prepared for sale, worrying about my sick mother…and taking it out on you.. I’ve been accusatory, saying things I know simply aren’t true… about when I was in the perfect world of your arms… I wish I didn’t have to apologize but I do. Mystery Man, I didn’t mean it, what I said about boats, especially. I was, am under the duress of all of this; and I’m too afraid to tell you. I am not sure you would even listen to me, and this is my unadorned apology. I am sorry Mystery Man –I just ask you to please understand. My mind is going in circles, round and round your sweet clockwork face –you know I look at your face and love it, can trace every crease in both my mind and heart…

and this version:

but mostly it’s “If You Stay in my Corner” (The Dells):

I know I have a volume of poetry coming out every soon now, I can wait to see the galleys, my 11th book! “Wannabe Hoochie Mama Gallery of Relities’ Red Dress Code” –and I am so excited about that! –words cannot begin to describe the joy I feel just thinking about that book, cracking the spine, smelling it, even licking some of my favorite pages, photographing myself holding it, traveling and reading from the book! –I cannot wait for such moments;

Here is the cover, and it is available for pre-order right now on Amazon dot com :

Now of course, I’m looking forward to Wannabe, but I do admit to being even more excited about just the possibilty of this romance novel, because I get to partcipate in such ideal love and passion through my characters, eveything I may want, the characters experience; how could I write it and deny the protagonist the experience I would want for myself?—if I could have it– maybe someday, because this writer believes in love..

I will always believe in what love can accomplish with that Mystery Man (you), or with any man; I am not the kind of woman who will be happy without a flesh and blood man –who knows who I am, a woman who wants a man who will be hers, and I will be his.

I sure hope it’s you.I know I don’t have to tell you again, but I sure like saying it, get caught up in the refrain of it.

But even more disturbing right now, is the increasingly deteriorating condition of my mother. She is losing her grasp of reality… Her diabetes is out of control; she’s been falling and not telling her doctor. She’s not taking her medicine and using profanity the likes of which I’ve never heard her use. Glaucoma, Thyroid trouble, Heart disease, Out-of-Control Hypertension

Her situation is so exasperating, she is not taking her medicine, and this sick diabetic woman is now about the same weight I am, this has never been the case! –always since I can remember, 40 pounds heavier than me. I understand that her backyard lawn has not been cut in a couple of months; my father died on 13 July 1980, and when I called to remind her that it was the 36th anniversary of my father’s death, she didn’t know what the day meant, nor did she know me –I had to explain who I was…

(She is 86 years old, and I am 62 years old)

A little later, some pictures of my mother and my mixed race father, and my non-black paternal grandfather, with Caucasian, and Native American Heritage and Ancestry from India

(includes some artwork by my mother; she was born in Alabama, a tiny town not on most maps, and was very senstitive about her color; when she was more lucid she told me that she was always called the “Little Black One” –this casued her to use “Nadinola” all over her face, arms, legs, neck, to lighten her skin –this was very important to her! She hated being dark skinned, had high yellow dreams, I was not high yellow at all, but did have the prize hair, all my life, but even more so now –she encouraged me never to go into the sun; she is so embarrassed by her hair that she always wears a wig, and even did so for my wedding (you can see that Nadinola glow [somewhat radioactive, it seems to me] in her face. My father was already sick; what was he really thinking?):

Bride Thylias, with my father and just with the bouquet, 25 August 1973:

I had a tremendous amount of hair then, the teenager that I was.

Wedding day 25 August 1973

I made all the dresses for the bridesmaids and flower girl in my wedding (sewing based on what I learned in a single semester of home economics in seventh grade):

and if my mother could understand it, she would be shocked that I walk in the sun, anyway, and yes, even flaunt my “good hair” –I’m glad I have it; I will not lie, and this 62-year-old woman with multiple sclerosis, who almost died on 29 July 2011 when a cranial aneurysm ruptured, and my head was partially shaved, but the hair has grown back profusely! –in a straighter and natural texture; I’ve even gone walking in the rain! (trusting that my hair would retain its length, and not revert (to what it never was):

–I have quite a thing for my hair, I admit that, and I also admit, in my mind, at least, that I walked to that elusive Mytery Man –but I fool no one, and certainly not you; I fear I will always love you, and you are certainly most deserving of love (there is no better lover; nothing compares with being in your arms –I admit that I just want you to love me back; that is all I want… I can’t even sustain any anger toward you… I’ve tried and it doesn’t last. What is it about you? –I fear I’ll never be able to let you go!

Mystery Man, just love me back; that’s all; just love me back! –now I’m begging you… I liked much better when you were chasing me; you know how to persue better than most men.. What more do you want from me? –please don’t say nothing unless that is the truth

–I learned this from this Mystery Man, from you, that I am in fact beautiful, you always told me that, and no one else ever did, not even my ex-spouse, I was so lonely and hungry for compliments, just wanted to know that the man I was with liked how I looked, a shapely and sexy little package, and was happy to be seen with me; my ex-spouse said he didn’t tell me because “my head would swell”; Mystery Man , you didn’t care how big my head was; when I told you, Mystery Man, that you were the only man who called me beautiful, you could not believe it, so I told you, which was true, that outside of catcalls, whistles and other unsolicited reactions, it was only your opinions that matter to me, and this is more true now than ever (with what I’m experiencing with my mother and those well-meaning souls around her, I need “The Comfort of a Man,” the Comfort of you,Mystery Man.

and I learned to believe you. My ex never told me that I was beautiful, but now, I KNOW I AM –so even if nothing else happens between us, I learned valuable things from you, endless pasion; I was loved by you as every woman, as every prerson should be loved, the heights of pleasure, heights of desire, there is no denying this, and if nothing else, I learned how to express this love to you… You were patient with me, realizing what I didn’t know and realizing what I was able to feel with you… and I have nothing but thanks for you for that, sort of similar to

But I was older than the writer of that thank you to my ex ; I experienced my first real adult love afffair with you. In most ways, I have to admit that you Mystery Man are my first love as the adult woman I am now, and there is no wonder that I want physical love, all forms of love with you again… Should come as no surprise at all. You are the Right Kind of Lover! as in:

It is that good being with you whoever you are, a man of my dreams fully fulfilled A man I will never forget and, truth be told, do not want to forget. Ever. I just want you to want me so much that you won’t mind admitting it, that I won’t have to be a side chick or a friend with benefits. I want the comfort of a man, the comfort of you Mystery Man –there is nothing else like it, no one else like you….

Side chick

and ideally not just secret lovers, though I cannot lie to myself I would take that; you are such an exquisite lover, well, Atantic Starr can say it better:

No secret to that wonderful, dammit! Mystery Man that as Luther says, I came here for you to love –for you Mystery Man, all for you!

Luther Vandross, “For You to Love”:

So “My First Love“, and “Comfort of a Man” for you, everything for you… –“I Will Always Love You“

and I will Always Love you

Mystery Man, I just pray that you will Love Me back; that’s all, Mystery Man –and I am not as high maintenance as I must seem to you.

Lord help me, I so love you, Mystery Man, and Lord help me, sometimes I wish I didn’t, but I keep wishing and hoping, as in this Dionne Warwick rendition –I am yours, but are you mine? –are you kidding? I know you like long hair, and I didn’t buy mine; if hair were all it takes, you would be mine… but if even the long hair fails, this 100% natural butt-kissing hair, you can play with my hair all day, all night and it will not come off, I do not have to worry about “weave sex” as discussed in the film good hair what can I do? And if my hair won’t do it, nor any of my other natural looks that I so want you to desire… My tiny waist, my shapely hips, those peachy breasts that ripen whenever you are near, if these things don’t entice you, what will? –and why do I care so much? it isn’t as if you’re the only man in the world! –but you are the only man I want in my world.

Trailer from Chris Rock’s “Good Hair“:

I do want to be in your heart! (so embedded that without me, you’d have no heart)–no lie there!

So there you have it, waiting for “Wannabe“(that’s definite), hoping like crazy for my romance novel in which the female character is loved back, and then some, my dying dementia-ridden diabetic mother with hypertension that would have already killed the more ordinary; she has already given up on life, and is just waiting to go home to Jesus, while her house that my father bought in 1963, and where she still lives rapidly deteriorates… Oh I remember being in the south, and my father able to go into stores that my mother could not enter; I remember hiding in the car, being so frightened, because in that tiny Tennessee town, there were some who did not feel that the races should mix…

I cannot explain exactly how my paternal grandfather could even exist… Caucasian, Native American, and Indian (as in “India”) and my own problems with not only finding the right man –which I’ve done– but having you willing/able to love me back… Unless you have married… I do not know.

If you are that deeply in love with somone other than me, I would like to know so that I can begin to adjust, but let me tell you, there is no man on this earth I would rather kiss, and there is no man on this earth I woud rather touch, and there is no man on this earth I would rather have kiss me, no other man on this earth I would rather have hold me, and no other man on this earth I would rather hold —

But I do need a love of my own! as in:

If you think I’ve confessed to you Mystery Man how much I love you in this post, I assure you that I’ve confessed this to you even more in texts… I so want you just to notice me… I so want things you said in the past to still be true… This is not the first time I’ve said any of this, and I fear that sometimes I should keep my blabbermouth shut, but if you can love me for what I am, I should be able to say anything to you… I even asked you to tell me if you thought you could ever love me; I asked you to tell me that you’re sure you never want to hold me again, to never touch me again, to just tell me, because I can’t wait for you forever, but if you know you can’t ever love me, I want to know that…

but if it’s possible, as much as I say I wouldn’t, I would take you back–not you you’re gone, still BFFs–, so rather elevate both of us from BFFs to lovers… –which is what I want, but if you don’t? Too bad for you, but, for now, I love this Mystery Man! –I love you–even if I shouldn’t.

I have never loved a man the way that I love that Mystery Man: you:

Now some pics of how I look right now, and what this Mystery Man (you) seem willing to give up. My hair: no wig, no weaves, no hair pieces, no extensions, 100% natural hair, waist-length and rooted in my scalp; 98 pounds, no plastic surgery anywhere; I have never had to diet. Everything about me is natural except for some hair dye from time to to my hair. No bleaching or skin whitening creams. My own “yellow” teeth (I will be going to the dentist). I was told that I have dense breasts in my most recent mammogram (a week ago), but no abnormalities detected dense breasts –as I’ve had since I was a teenager in triple D cups –really got me noticed, and may have helped that deacon decide to rape me, but they are natural, no implants –never, As that you Mystery Man, know better than anyone…

I love you, Mystery Man. I honestly love you. You know I do.

For the record, this is just too much for me, trying to prepare to sell my house, a son I love dearly who isn’t that cooperative, and then his partner who lives with him in my basement (so far, I haven’t received even a penny from my tenants [who aren’t that tidy]), the romance novel, trying to find my way on my own, without a car, too difficult for me to feel that I can drive safely with my optic neuritis, a consequence of my MS–but I can walk six miles most days, three miles to a locaton where often I find so many geese, and amazing sunsets:

Walking for Joy, hoping for Bob, trying to accept that it might not be him; my world being crushed

Walking for Joy, hoping for Bob, trying to accept that it might not be him; my world being crushed

Walking for Joy, hoping for Bob, trying to accept that it might not be him; my world being crushedgeese

Walking for Joy, hoping for Bob, trying to accept that it might not be him; my world being crushedgeese

Walking for Joy, hoping for Bob, trying to accept that it might not be him; my world being crushed

Walking for Joy, hoping for Bob, trying to accept that it might not be him; my world being crushed

–and yet I must still shop for food, and I want to do these things for myelf, and see what might happen (don’t I hope) with that Mystery Man (you), and if not you, then someone else. I hope it can be you –please “I say A Little Prayer”

and this version of saying a little prayer:

First task is to sell this house and be free of a house too big for me to take care of by myself, without help from my tenants, as it currently is, one of whom is my own 25-year-old son who has psychological problems, that I don’t believe he inherited from his Bangladeshi sperm donor paternity. Such donations and family backgrounds are screened. Sperm donations are kept for six months before being used. I was lucky in that one visit was all it took for me to conceive… the difference a good sample makes, I was told, by the fertility clinic’s doctor.

I recall that when my ex-spouse found out about this pregancy he did not want me to have; I remember that he said, “Didn’t I consider AIDS”? -and he would probably say that my son’t psychological problems stem from the donor. I do not know. I want the best possible outcomes for everyone.

And yes, you better believe that I want you, Mystery Man… But, I want you to want me too.

Do I really ask for too much in asking for love?

So this is my crazy life right now, but it is life, and I wouldn’t have it any other way…

Thank you for reading this.

Sorry that I rambled on and on… I have so much on my spilling plate… And that Mystery Man

is not here.

I am never giving up on love, even if that makes me a fool for love, fool, fool , fool for that Mystery Man ; fool, fool for you.

I hope I am able to report something better about you, that one day, you are no longer a mystery man because we enter a better relationship, one that isn’t all me, for now, my impossible dream, but I really pray for more than that…

This is more than enough for one night; I love you Mystery Man enough for a thousand and one nights, for a million nights, for every night. –I can’t help what my heart feels, one thing that is for sure, Mystery Man, “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine“

(Lou Rawls can help me with this one, and I do need help, loving this Mystery Man [you) as I do):